The Science behind the design - Contour Design

The infancy of Contour Design started with the interaction of our owner, Steve Wang, with a group of industrial design engineers. While working with Steve on another project, one of the engineers complained that he had developed Carpal Tunnel Syndrome after using a computer mouse for years. He was experiencing severe pain in his wrists and hands and found it difficult to continue working with a mouse. The two men talked and decided to see if they could design a computer mouse that allowed the hand to work in a beneficial posture that would eliminate the risk of developing Repetitive Strain Injuries such as Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and Tendonitis

Over the next eighteen months, Steve worked with ten CAD/CAM engineers who were all suffering from Repetitive Strain Injuries. They evolved through 120 design molds before they developed a beneficial design that allowed the injured engineers to work with the mouse for eight hours without pain. That intense laboratory work spawned the design for the first Contour Perfit Mouse.

While conducting field studies for the new design, Steve discovered that certain subjects felt the benefits of the new mouse while others did not. He finally realized that his original design subjects were all about the same shape and size, therefore their hand sizes were approximately the same. He recognized that smaller test subjects had trouble keeping their hand on top of the device and using the buttons. To solve this challenge, he scaled the design up and down in size and also produced a number of "left handed" mice. This led to the seven different sizes that we currently offer. Three for left hand users and four for right hand users. Subsequent field studies validated that different sizes were crucial to enabling different users to enjoy the benefits of the ergonomic design.

The important difference to recognize about Contour Design is that we worked with live test subjects who were experiencing pain and we kept on reworking the design until the painful hand positions were eliminated. We didn't develop our designs in a wind tunnel or in a marketing firm board room to make them look streamlined, sexy or slick. We also don't come out with a new set of designs every year to revitalize our look and feel. We have been selling the same design for the past thirteen years and our best customers are ergonomists at large companies who order hundreds of units a year because the design really works to reduce and eliminate pain. Their associates spread the good word to their fellow coworkers and the result is a continual stream of reorders. The design really works.